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editorial - rt103

Naples 2011, Donna Marcus, found aluminium (detail), NOW and WHEN: Australian Urbanismcourtesy the artist and dianne tanzer gallery + projects

“We are called on to be the architects of the future, not its victims,” Buckminster Fuller once insisted. His words are an apt reminder of the rising public passion now for the re-casting of cities to improve access, health and the environment. Alternatively, we could become the artists of the future. There’s plenty of evidence in this, The Future City edition of RealTime, where we report on artists, often in collaboration with the public and working in public spaces, altering our perception of the city, recasting it as gallery and performance arena, communal meeting place and green environment. Our stories range from a gardening project in an art school (Tending) to re-workings of the city (Right to the City) and pragmatic and fantastical cities of the future (NOW and WHEN). Dancers re-cast Perth (Tongues of Stone). An artist and the community transform a city centre south of Sydney with video works and a performative installation (The Begin-Again). Performers place their audience inside a cardboard Manila in Sydney’s West in Within & Without (p2). An artist creates a site-listening guide to greater Brisbane. Visiting Irish/UK artists Desperate Optimists show their film Tiong Bahru in which Singaporean locals enact the tensions and pleasures of their lives. In Birmingham UK, artists in the Fierce festival inventively take on the city. On this page, Gold Coast artist Donna Marcus, in an adjunct exhibition to NOW and WHEN, reflects on the architectural layering and historical aura of Naples using found aluminium cook-ware. And, in the first of our Burning Issue features, you can read how the late German theatre provocateur Christoph Schlingensief made cities politically performative.